Thereâ€™s a Shiny New Trend in Social Media: Actual Human Editors

In the past week, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube all announced new curation features that rely on humans to sift through and select the best content from their massive collections of user posts. YouTube isÂ using Storyful editors to verify breaking news videosÂ in a new newsroom page, Twitter isÂ building a project known as LightningÂ to curate streams of tweets around major events and Instagram is now pulling photos into themed category pages to live within the appâ€™s search tab.

And these companies are actually hiring media pros â€” many of them journalists or former editors â€” to use their news judgement to determine which content their users should see (or not see) when it comes to following a particular story.